129 | A quick tip to make referrals easier

0:00 Hi there, welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman, and this podcast is for herbalists and nutritionists who are in clinical practice. I have a request for you if you are somebody who is a practitioner and somebody who has a website. And before I get to the request, I'm going to tell you a short story. I get asked for referrals probably several times a week. Either somebody wants to work with me and I'm full, or I'm not the right person for them, or I'll just hear from somebody who says, hey, I'm looking for a nutritionist in New York? Or do you know any herbalists who specialize in SIBO? Or things like that. And because of the line of work I'm in, I know a lot of practitioners, lots and lots of them.

0:41 However, it's not always easy for me to remember who's practicing where and so forth. So there are times, for example, if I'm like, oh, I'm looking for somebody who's a nutritionist in New York. And I'm like, oh, I think this handful of people are in New York, or at least in the New York area. And so what I'll do is I will go to those people's websites and I will look around to see, is this person licensed in New York? Are they practicing in New York? Is there a way to set up an appointment with them? And I would say 8 out of 10 times, I cannot easily tell from just the first page of somebody's website where they practice and in the case of people who are licensed, for example, nutritionists, which states they're licensed in.

1:26 And that makes it really hard to refer because then what I've got to do is I've got to click through your website, maybe go to your about page, maybe go to your services page, maybe scroll through FAQ to find out wherever it says, do you see people online? Are you seeing people in certain states? And so forth. And a lot of times, it's not even there when I go digging around. And so what that means is that, A, it's just easier for me to refer to the people who have this in an obvious place, but I also worry a little bit about clients who are doing the same thing but don't actually know, necessarily that that's even something they need to look for, or that might be easier for them to just click away and go to somebody who does show up easily on that search.

2:07 So even if you are somebody who's not licensed, for example, herbalists, we aren't licensed, but somebody may be looking for somebody in person. So they specifically might want an herbalist in New Jersey or what have you. And if it's hard for them to tell easily from your website whether you practice in New Jersey, then they're not going to spend five or ten minutes clicking around on your website to find out this information. Okay, so my suggestion is that you put this in the footer of your website. That is the obvious place where people go to look for location. If you're trying to figure out, you know, is this a physical location or something like that, have it in your footer.

2:48 So perhaps you might have those little icons of your social media or a little copyright statement or something like that in your footer. Right in that same area, can you say, seeing clients one-on-one virtually throughout the United States and in person in New Jersey? Or if you live in kind of a big state where the city might matter, for example, if you're in Texas, somebody may want to know, are you practicing. In Houston or are you practicing in El Paso? Because one of those might be accessible to them and one of them might not. You might say in the greater Houston area, seeing clients virtually throughout the United States and in person in Houston or even the area of Houston that you're in.

3:31 Like, make it easy for people to immediately see, do you even offer the service that I want in the location that I want? All right, so open up your website right now. Pretend you're a client and you want to see a practitioner in person in Maryland. Can that person easily tell if that is you or not and then they can move on or they can contact you because they know oh you offer in-person consults in maryland or license to see clients in, you know north carolina florida and maryland whatever it is make it easy for people to figure out if you are going to be able to work with them without having to click through 14 things Okay, so that's my little plea.

4:15 A little nudge for you to look at your website and see somewhere on the first page or in the footer, does it say where you see clients, either is that exclusively online or is it, exclusively in person or is it a combo, so that folks can make that decision, including folks like me who may want to refer to you and send other clients your way. All right, I hope that's helpful. If you are not already on my email list, I would love to see you there. You can go to intheclinic.com or camillefreeman.com to sign up. That is a email that goes out for practitioners specifically every Thursday, and I send out resources, recommendations, books that I've been reading, and a little note about something related to clinical practice.

5:00 So I'd love to see you there. All right, have an amazing day. Thank you so much for all the work that you do, and I will talk to you very soon.